The man who quit money (and the writer who told his tale)
Former river guide and Manhattan Beach native Mark Sundeen delivers a myth for our times – one that happens to be a true story
Daniel Suelo, the subject of The Man Who Quit Money, written by Mira Costa grad Mark Sundeen. Photo by Benjamin Lesage
In the first year of the twenty-first century, a man standing by a highway in the middle of America pulled from his pocket his life savings – thirty dollars – laid it inside a phone booth, and walked away. He was thirty-nine years old, came from a good family, and had been to college. He was not mentally ill, nor an addict. His decision appears to have been an act of free will by a competent adult.
In the twelve years since, as the Dow Jones skyrocketed to its all-time high, Daniel Suelo has not earned, received, or spent a single dollar. In an era when anyone who could sign his name qualified for a mortgage, Suelo did not apply for loans or write IOUs. He didn’t even barter. As the public debt soared to eight, ten, finally thirteen trillion dollars, he did not pay taxes, or accept food stamps, welfare, or any other form of government handout.
Instead he set up house in caves in the Utah canyonlands, where he forages mulberries and wild onions, scavenges roadkill raccoons and squirrels, pulls expired groceries from dumpsters, and is often fed by friends and strangers. “My philosophy is to use only what is freely given or discarded & what is already present & already running,” he writes. While the rest of us grapple with tax deductions, variable-rate mortgages, retirement plans, and money-market accounts, Suelo no longer holds so much as an identification card.
Yet the man who sleeps under bridges and prospects in trash cans is not a typical hobo. He does not panhandle, and he often works – declining payment for his efforts. While he is driven by spiritual beliefs and longings, he is not a monk, nor is he associated with any church. And although he lives in a cave, he is not a hermit: he is relentlessly social, remains close with friends and family, and engages in discussions with strangers via the website he maintains from the public library. He has crisscrossed the West by bicycle, hopped freight trains, hitched through nearly every state in the union, hauled nets on a Bering Sea trawler, harvested mussels and kelp from Pacific beaches, spearfished salmon in Alaska streams, and braved three months of storms atop an ancient hemlock tree.
“I know it is possible to live with zero money,” Suelo declares. “Abundantly.”
— Mark Sundeen, The Man Who Quit Money
Mark Sundeen ran across his old acquaintance Daniel Suelo a few years ago in a market in Moab, Utah. Suelo, deeply weathered and wearing threadbare clothes, looked at Sundeen with a beatific smile from across an aisle. Sundeen fled the store immediately. He walked away with an anger that didn’t even quite make sense to him at the time.
The two men’s roads had diverged. They’d each arrived in Moab roughly 15 years earlier, consciously leaving the more workaday world behind. Sundeen lived in a tent; Suelo house-sat. Both were highly educated and purposefully underemployed. Sundeen, originally from Manhattan Beach, had graduated from Stanford and would later earn a master’s degree in writing from USC. Suelo, a University of Colorado graduate and former Peace Corps volunteer, was a self-made theologian of a sort who’d left behind a fundamentalist childhood and later a career in social work. They’d worked together as cooks at a natural foods restaurant called Honest Ozzie’s.
Sundeen went on to become a river raft guide and Outward Bound leader before eventually launching his career as an author. In addition to three books, he was a contributor to such national publications as the New York Times and Outside magazine. After a decade of scrambling to make $8,000 a year, he had achieved some degree of financial success – he owned a house in Montana and maintained property in Moab.
Suelo had gone the opposite direction. He took to living in caves in the nearby canyon lands. The more time he spent in nature, and the more he studied its ways, the more convinced he became that there was a simpler, perhaps better way to live. His journey into willful moneylessness occurred by degrees – sojourns to India, Alaska, Oregon, and Nova Scotia would play a role – but by the time Sundeen laid eyes upon him again during that brief encounter in Moab he had been joyfully living without a cent for years.
Word had traveled. Sundeen knew that his former friend had chosen this unusual path, and assumed he’d lost his mind. The poor condition of that friendly smile seemed to confirm it – Suelo had bad teeth, Sundeen noticed. But his revulsion, he later realized, was about more than Suelo’s darkened teeth.
“I should not be forced to look at his sorry mouth,” Sundeen wrote. “The sight made me ashamed – of my own excellent dental condition, my disposable income, my rental property – as if he had accused me directly. My shame made me mad.”
Not long thereafter, Suelo gained some national attention with an article written about him in Details magazine. The editor of Sundeen’s previous book called him up after reading the story.
“Hey, do you still live in Moab?” the editor asked.
“No,” Sundeen said.
“Well, I’ve been reading about this guy who lives down there without money,” the editor said. “Have you ever heard of him?”
“Yeah. I’ve known that guy 15 years. We used to work at a restaurant together.”
The editor sent an email to Suelo – who maintains his own website from the Moab Public Library – and asked if he’d be interested in being the subject of a book. Suelo remembered Sundeen and in fact had read his books. He agreed, while noting that he couldn’t take any money for participating, “otherwise it would render the whole thing nonsense.”
Sundeen returned to Moab. He didn’t know exactly how to locate Suelo. He sent a message and hoped that his subject would emerge from his cave and check his email. Then, sure enough, sitting on the front porch of a friend’s home where he was staying, Sundeen saw a familiar figure serenely pedaling a bicycle down the road in front of him. He ran out in the road and called his name, “Daniel!”
Suelo turned and made his way to Sundeen, who couldn’t help noticing how stylish he looked for somebody who was essentially a homeless man. He wore a black felt bolero hat. “He looked like a cross between a Great Depression hobo and a vagabound French painter – Buster Keaton meets Paul Gaguin,” Sundeen wrote.
Thus began their adventure together, which culminated in last week’s release of The Man Who Quit Money and continues Thursday night with a joint appearance at Pages bookstore in Manhattan Beach and a discussion Sunday morning at the Manhattan Beach Community Church.
An author and a subject have rarely been as well matched. Sundeen has delivered a penetrating, wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful book. Whether one believes Suelo to be a madman or a saint (or both), a reader comes away from Sundeen’s book learning something – including a short history of our monetary system, the fine art of dumpster-diving, life in the canyonlands and a survey of religious thinkers ranging from St. Francis of Assisi to Teilhard de Chardin (the book begins with quotes from Jesus, Buddha, and Merle Haggard).
“Maybe it’s just the odd, precarious moment we live in, but Daniel Suelo’s story seems to offer some broader clues for all of us,” wrote Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, about the book. “Mark Sundeen’s account will raise subversive and interesting questions in any open mind.”
Eat, Pray, Love bestselling writer Elizabeth Gilbert was even more effusive: “This is a beautiful, thoughtful, and wonderful book,” she wrote. “I suspect I may find myself thinking about it every day for the rest of my life.”
Sundeen, in an interview this week, said that he does not consider himself a spiritual person but after spending time with Suelo he cannot rightly believe that things are entirely coincidental – including the parallel lines of his and Daniel’s life intersecting once again to produce this book.
“The thing I am really proud of about this book is I don’t think anyone else could have written it,” Sundeen said. “Someone else could have written a different book. But you had to be in Moab in the ‘90s to really understand the kind of influence…and not only that, but you had to have at least some experience living this way to understand that it’s not a joke – that it’s not that he couldn’t hack it, and that’s what people, I think, especially on the East Coast and possibly in Southern California, might think. ‘Oh, he couldn’t hack it.’ Or, ‘He’s insane.’ Or, ‘He’s immature.” It’s not a joke: there is real freedom to be found. And if you don’t go for it and you don’t live this way, you will never know about it, and you will probably be kind of skeptical about it.”
Seekers
Author Mark Sundeen. Photo by Benjamin Lesage
I once knew a man who lived in a hole. It was located on a cliff on some of the best real estate in the U.S., on the tip of the peninsula in a public park in San Francisco, with the ocean below stretching west and the Golden Gate Bridge framing the inland view from the hole’s rooftop entrance.
He dug his hole out of heartbreak, but in some sense the entire trajectory of his life had lead to that hole. And it was a beautiful hole, cozy and hobbit-like – oil-lit, with hardwood floors and a roof made out of found wood, held up by two intertwining sturdy branches that he described as “two ancient lovers, reunited.” He lived there for five years; he paid off his student loans in two, learned saxophone, read voluminously, and only left for a pilgrimage to India to visit a temple of rats (the hole had suffered a bit of rat infestation which, oddly, was cured upon his return).
I stayed in this hole various times with my friend, and maybe the most remarkable thing was how hidden in plain sight it was. The park was a busy place for walkers and runners, but the hole was just enough off the beaten path – and supremely well-camouflaged – that no one ever discovered its existence, despite the frequent comings-and-goings of a couple six-foot tall hairy men with twigs in their beards.
Those who take a sharp turn away from the well-worn path of convention and conformity sometimes – often, even – possess good reasons for doing so, as well as the unbounded imagination and sheer guts to live as their instincts tell them to. “Philosophy is man’s attempt to be at home, everywhere,” Pascal wrote. In becoming homeless, Suelo sought to be more deeply at home. And Sundeen, despite his initial reaction to Suelo’s evident homelessness, understood this search – because he was, in his own way, a seeker too.
Sundeen grew up in a family and a community that encouraged seeking. His parents, Richard and Rosie Sundeen, actually met in the Princeton Theological Seminary. Together, they left religious life, and moved to California. Richard taught in the public policy school at USC; after raising their children, Rosie taught at a variety of schools, including El Camino, Long Beach State, and the South Bay Adult School.
In matters of faith, the Sundeens were very careful how they raised their kids. Mainly, they wanted their children to be open-minded.
“I think it was no theology,” Rosie Sundeen said. “I think we both kind of started to lean more towards a very liberal bent, and I’ll speak for myself, more secular humanism. We didn’t believe that church should be forced on the children. We took them when they were young, but really didn’t insist that they go. I think our values – of justice and equality – certainly influenced them. Some of that seeped in there somewhere.”
They were also part of group of about four families that called themselves “the Ojai group” that regularly went on camping trips together, first to Ojai and later all around California (and eventually expanded to include eight families, and decades later, grandchildren). The families all met through the Manhattan Beach Nursery School, a cooperative that requires direct parent participation.
Many of the children from that group would become artists and writers, including both Mark and his brother Rich (who is a graphic artist) and their close friends Tim and Erik Bluhm (Tim is the lead singer of the band Mother Hips and Erik is both a musician and a painter).
Mark Sundeen also identified Mira Costa High School in the 1980s as a place that fostered creativity, with teachers such as Geraldine Wadhams, Terry Fredericks, Bob Sumpter, Ann Pomeroy, and Marilyn Whirry who encouraging their students to think for themselves.
“They were all amazing teachers,” Sundeen said. “Dr. Whirry was kind of a radical ‘60s liberal…Everyone sat in a circle in her classroom. She used to have beanbags, but by my time we sat in chairs, no tables. She was the first to introduce me to Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and the Berrigan brothers – that sort of stuff, sort of idealistic rebellion against commercial culture.”
Erik Bluhm recalled there was a sort of do-it-yourself creativity and air of rebellion in the air in the South Bay at the time,
“Black Flag was playing and [artist Raymond] Pettibon flyers were posted up and down Sepulveda before the shows – that was a totally done by yourself kind of thing,” he said. “That was what we saw as our role models.”
Tim Bluhm said he never quite fit in to the dominant local surf culture. Instead, he and Mark used to head to the desert and to the mountains, where they avidly took up rock climbing.
“I sort of fell out,” Bluhm said. “It would seem like it was very much a culture of popularity and sports. Once I got to a certain age I didn’t feel like I belonged…there was this sort of culture of elitism. I didn’t know what it was at the time but by the time I was 13 or 14 I felt alienated by the typical beach kid culture. And it was like if I wasn’t going to be the most popular kid, or among them, I was going to reject the whole system, screw it, didn’t want to be marginalized. That’s when we started going to the mountains more.”
Sundeen was more socially connected than his friend. He was the editor of La Vista, the Mira Costa school paper, and excelled academically. His high school years, in fact, would in many ways shape him. What he learned from his teachers and from his excursions into the wild led him on the path that would eventually result in the book he has just written.
“When I got to Stanford, I was actually disillusioned that a lot of the professors seemed like careerists. They were more interested in their jobs,” Sundeen said. “They weren’t passionate thinkers the way a lot of [the] Mira Costa public high school teachers were. No exaggeration, you can trace a straight line from the things I learned in high school –Martin Luther King, Thoreau, Albert Camus – to the book I just published 20 years later.”
“I was thinking I was coming from this second rate public school, but it turned out the education I got at Mira Costa really rivaled and actually blew away the education kids from Exeter and Milton and places like that had.”
Erik Bluhm was living in the Bay Area when Sundeen went to Stanford and recruited him to help launch what was initially a zine called Great God Pan. The self-published magazine was an odd amalgamation of California history, lore, and myth and whatever the hell else they felt like writing about. Sundeen, who credits Bluhm for essentially forcing him to write, learned a valuable lesson from Great God Pan.
“I think all of a sudden he realized, ‘Oh, I can write – I don’t have to get published. I can just write whatever I want,’” Bluhm recalled.
And so, after college, he chose not to follow a traditional career path of any kind. Instead, he drove off into the American West, in search of adventure, stories, and a way off the beaten path.
The speck chooses
Sundeen never intended to go to Moab.
He’d been wandering around the West for a year after graduating from college and had just flunked out of a river guide training school in Colorado when he drove into Utah. He was intending to go to Outward Bound headquarters in Jensen, Utah, when he picked up two hitchhikers bound for Moab. He dropped them off at a junction and continued along his way only to run into a roadblock – a landslide had stopped traffic, and the detour would take ten hours.
“I wasn’t going to do that. I came back and the hitchhikers were still where I left them on the side of the road,” Sundeen recalled. “They said, ‘Well, we are still going to Moab, why don’t you come with us?’ I said, sure, why not?”
He ended up staying in Moab, on and off, for eleven years. Something often said by Suelo, who he would meet later that year, rings true for both the writer and his subject: “Randomness is my guru.” Moab was a dusty desert outpost that had been a gathering point for outcasts and seekers for nearly a century.
“So many people came here because their car broke down or they were hitching and got dropped off here,” Sundeen said. “I think one of the lines in the book is, ‘Daniel didn’t choose the speck on the map. The speck chose him.’ It was the same way for me.”
Sundeen returned for a while to Manhattan Beach in the ‘90s as he and Bluhm turned Great God Pan into a genuine magazine, one that attracted so much critical attention that it eventually landed them a writing fellowship back in Utah. The last issue of Great God Pan was actually a compendium of Utah history and folklore and – in another bit of preparation for the book that would follow years later – an exploration of the saintly wanderers and societal misfits who’d peopled Utah’s desert’s past and present. His first published book, Car Camping: The Book of Desert Adventures, would grow out of pieces he’d written in the magazine. He’d walked away from a career in writing to almost by accident discover a career in writing.
He published two more books – The Making of Toro and North by Northwestern, about Mexican bullfighting and Alaskan fishermen, respectively – by the time the fateful phone call came regarding Daniel Suelo and his quest to live without money. In some strange way, everything he’d done to this point had prepared him to tell this outlandish tale.
Daniel Suelo and Mark Sundeen.
His journey with Suelo – which is Spanish for soil and Suelo’s adopted name, replacing Shellabarger – began with a backpack trip to the man’s caves. “What was surprising about the first cave was that it was tiny – you couldn’t stand up inside,” he said. “It felt like a hide-out for a mountain lion. The next cave was spacious with a great view of the canyon and a place to build a campfire…At night you could see the stars and hear the creek rushing through the reeds.”
Sundeen is a gifted reporter in part because he is unsparing in his own search beyond the surface of things. Early on, he asked Suelo for a reading list to provide some background into his way of thinking. Suelo came back with a list of 30 books that included many of the world’s major religious texts. Both the subject matter and the writer of The Man Who Quit Money are almost shockingly erudite – Sundeen also researched what amounted to the economic history of mankind – but the book pulls off the trick of carrying this erudition lightly, traveling as it does into the byways of America and deep into its desert heart.
Suelo is not singular in what he is doing – in India, for example, many people, called sadhus, have forsaken material possession. Sundeen said the story is important to him largely because of the timing and place of Suelo’s endeavor. This has been a time, after all, of disappearing money in America.
“To me, he’s not that interesting if you take him out of the context of these times,” Sundeen said. “He’s certainly a curiosity, but what is interesting is he was saying all along that money is an illusion. Say, if you live in Manhattan Beach you might have a house worth $2 million that the next day is worth $1 million. ‘Hey, what happened? I had that extra $1 million?’ If you come to his way of thinking, that money was always an illusion, in a sense.”
Neither Sundeen nor Suelo are attempting to convince anyone to live a life of moneylessness.
“I don’t anticipate a lot of people following his path, and neither does he,” Sundeen said. “Daniel is not married and does not have children, so nobody relies on him for his financial support. Many people who hear about him come visit and try living without money, but most only last a few weeks or months…What people can take away is: If he can survive on next to nothing, maybe we can survive with less. Of course there are a lot of Americans who think such thinking is absurd: it is our right to have as much stuff as we want, so why would we try to have less? But there are an equal number who find the amount of stuff we have overwhelming, who would rather live a more simple life based on deeper connections with people, with nature, with God. These people might find in Suelo some inspiration to live more simply, and more in alignment with their deeper values.”
Perhaps the best trick Sundeen pulls off is to reveal that Suelo’s quest is not so outlandish. Though he has abandoned his evangelical upbringing, Suelo is still essentially attempting to live according to not only Jesus’ teachings (Sundeen quotes the gospels: “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor…”) but Buddha, Mohammed, and other spiritual leaders, many who perhaps not coincidentally also emerged from the scarcity of deserts. Which is not to say that Suelo aspires to be or is a religious figure, at all – he is simply a man in search of his own sense of security. He wants to be at home, everywhere.
“I’m employed by the universe,” Suelo writes. “Since everywhere I go is the universe, I am always secure. Life has flourished for billions of years like this. I never knew such security before I gave up money. Wealth is what we are dependent on for security. My wealth never leaves me. Do you think Bill Gates is more secure than I?”
Mark Sundeen and Daniel Suelo will appear at pages: a bookstore at 7 p.m. March 22.